Vincent Gallo -- his face angular, perpetually scruffy, and with a
piercing, insistently crazy gaze -- is the fulcrum on which Trouble
Every Day, a seat-clearing sexual vampire movie from impeccable
French stylist Claire Denis, turns. As usual, he looks intelligent,
handsome and scary in equal measure. It's no wonder recent gossip links
him romantically with PJ Harvey. He's that weird.
In Trouble Every Day, he's an enigma. As a pharmaceuticals
researcher who travels across most of America and the Atlantic Ocean to
spend a honeymoon with sweetie Tricia Vessey, he obviously has an ulterior
motive for being in Paris. He meets clandestinely with doctors who engage
in research activities like cutting up human brains and growing mutant
plants. He seems incapable of making love with his wife, choosing instead
to masturbate in the hotel bathroom, causing much consternation in his
marital relationship.
His story is told in parallel with that of a gloriously fucked-up
Beatrice Dalle, a beautiful basket case who prowls the outskirts of the
city for sexual partners. In an early scene, she lures a truck driver by
whipping her coat open, revealing a tight black dress and an open
invitation. The look on her face is¡ªwhat? Anticipation? Arousal? Hunger?
Her liaisons end unhappily, with a corpse in the grass and blood smeared
across her pretty lips. Her husband is a doctor, and he tries to keep his
ravenous wife behind lock and key, apparently for the public good.
For a good portion of Trouble Every Day's running time, this
is all the information we're given. Truth be told, it's all we need.
There's likely a sex-as-disease metaphor going on, which is very David
Cronenberg, and the I've-fucked-you-now-I-must-kill-you stuff is straight
outta Paul Schrader's Cat People. Or Liquid Sky? Or,
hell, Mantis in Lace. Whatever turns you on. Significantly, Denis
cuts away from the most baldly expository scenes before they venture too
deep into sci-fi/horror noodling¡ªwe have seen this all before, after all.
In the end, some kind of love story bubbles to the surface. Denis¡¯s
characters are searching for the meaning in their capricious, even
dangerous sexual urges. In Trouble Every Day, the great irony is
that the only selfless expression of love may be the failure to consummate
it.
What's beautiful and disturbing is Denis's take on the human body. Her
previous film, Beau Travail, was remarkable in the ways it
fetishized the semi-naked male, and this one feasts its camera gaze on the
bare skin of virtually every character with a speaking part in
screen-filling closeup. Agn¨¨s Godard¡¯s camera glides easily across the
human form, investing the distance between her lens and her subjects with
a luminous physicality. As Vessey bathes, the camera tracks up her legs
and thighs to her pubic hair, pivots slowsly as it crawls the rest of the
way over her torso and shoulders. The visual rhyme comes nearer the end of
the film, as Beatrice takes a lover who has come to liberate her from the
prison of her husband¡¯s making¡ªand, unwittingly, sacrifice himself to her.
The camera tracks across tufts of chest hair, magnified to enormous
proportions on the movie screen, lingers on a dark nipple, then twists
downward over the slowly heaving skin so that we're not sure whether we're
heading up the neck or down the belly. It's all marvelous, intimate
imagery, and the film would be breathtaking even if it were a
non-narrative piece, a study of the ways that light reveals human
figures.
But there's an urgency and even mysticism to the pictures, too, since
an enigmatic first-reel flashback has already shown us a body covered
entirely in droplets and rivulets of blood. Because we know that skin is
to be broken, the images of flesh take on new currency; you become highly,
erotically aware of the organs beneath the skin, the blood that pulses
through the veins until the integrity of the sack that holds it all
together is broken and the stuff just spews everywhere.
There's some spew on screen eventually¡ªquite a lot of blood, and even
some semen¡ªperhaps the last taboo in mainstream filmmaking. The film's
gory centerpieces cleared a few seats at its New York premiere; though it
isn't relentlessly violent, the material that is included is fairly
alarming on its own. I had actually expected something more over-the-top
and a bit more comic. As it is, the film is quite serious, like a tumor,
and the title (apparently borrowed from the Frank Zappa song) is an
understatement. Denis worked as an assistant director on Paris,
Texas and Wings of
Desire, and she seems to have borrowed a certain knack for
effective use of pop music from director Wim Wenders¡ªthe brooding score by
Tindersticks is one of the film¡¯s chief assets.
For all its low-key naturalism, the film has some problems that keep it
from feeling completely true and immediate. Vincent Gallo is a
relentlessly, almost hilariously dour protagonist. It¡¯s fortunate that
Denis cuts back and forth between his story and Dalle¡¯s for much of the
film¡¯s running time, since his glare can be hard to take. And I had a
particularly hard time believing that, upon being approached from behind
in a dark dressing room by an uninvited Gallo, a half-dressed hotel maid
would fail to scream bloody murder, whether or not she found him darkly
handsome and/or sexually intimidating. I guess French girls are
different.
From Deep
Focus
<
BACK